


Just this once

by clokkerfoot (orphan_account)



Category: The X-Files
Genre: Drabble, F/M, First Kiss, Fluff, POV Dana Scully
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-07-28
Updated: 2015-07-28
Packaged: 2018-04-11 19:00:24
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,060
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4448000
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/clokkerfoot
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The internal workings of Scully's fantastic mind when Mulder kissed her for the first time. </p><p>"When Mulder had finally taken the initiative and kissed Scully when the ball dropped, she had been nothing but surprised."</p>
            </blockquote>





	Just this once

**Author's Note:**

> No real plot, just a drabble so I could get into Scully's head. Enjoy!

When Mulder had finally taken the initiative and kissed Scully when the ball dropped, she had been nothing but surprised.

Not surprised that he had kissed her - the tension between the two of them had been building over seven years of unneeded touches and too-close conversations, for heaven's sake, so it was bound to happen eventually - but surprised that it felt like the most natural thing in the world.

Scully had been closely faced with Mulder's plump lips and kaleidoscopic eyes on more than one occasion over the years, but every single time they had gotten close enough to share breath, they had been interrupted. She tried not to think about the day in the hallway. That was the closest she had ever come to kissing Mulder, and just the thought of it drove her half-mad with frustration. Hell, even that incident with Eddie had given Scully a whole array of inappropriate fantasies for over a month. And that hadn't even been the real Mulder.

Both of those moments had been _close encounters_ , she had realised later on, the dry humour of that thought not lost on her.

Of all the things she expected when stood in front of a television screen, waiting for the millennium or Armageddon or something equally frightening, she had not expected Mulder to lean in and kiss her.

It was hardly the time for romance, considering half the world was frozen with fear that the millennium would destroy the electronic world, but Mulder, ever the romantic even in the face of death, kissed her anyway.

 _This is beyond a close encounter_ , she thought numbly as Mulder's lips touched against her own, light as a feather.

She had, probably not unlike Mulder, if his constant flirting and innuendos were anything to go by, fantasised about this moment countless times. At first, she had been fuelled by the sheer lack of intimacy that she had experienced since joining Mulder working on the X-files, and every imaginary kiss between the two of them had been rough and desperate, the culmination of too many late nights at the office and too many brushes with death. As their relationship - if it could even be called that - developed, the first kiss became softer, kinder, and less of an expression of love than a reminder of it.

Love. She hated the word.

She had denied her love for Mulder for a very, very long time - so long that she began to wonder if her aorta would burst from the sheer intensity of her denial. But, even when she was more angry with Mulder than she had ever been in her whole life, she couldn't fail to notice the way his eyes caught the light, the way his cheeks flushed when he was frustrated; the little things.

Her fortified wall of denial began to crack when Mulder gave her that stupid keyring for her birthday, when he sang _Special Agent Dana Katherine Scully_ , just to show everyone in that restaurant that he knew her better than anyone else.

The wall splintered right down the middle when they were in that hallway, over a year ago, when Mulder's eyes never left hers, even as he moved to kiss her. She could feel his lips brush against hers, could feel all their built up tension reach a peak, then the damn bee stung her and ruined everything.

Scully promised herself that she wouldn't let the wall break anymore, and she fought against herself - and Mulder - when they were mistaken for a couple countless times, and even when they were fake-married for a weekend.

Then Mulder kissed her.

The wall shattered.

If Scully were more forward, if she were more spontaneous, she might have taken the initiative and leapt into Mulder's arms, or pushed him against a wall. But Mulder gave no inclination that he wanted to take the gentle - and surprisingly sweet - kiss further, and Scully could never push it beyond what it was.

Scully's brain was never quiet, even when she was losing consciousness or lost in her own guilt, and even now, in this one pivotal moment, she was hyper-aware of everything. She counted seven seconds - seven blissful seconds - and not a single breath from either of them. It was as if their bodies were on hold, their vital functions paused for the sake of absorbing every detail of this long-awaited moment.

She felt Mulder's head move ever so slightly, as if he were angling their lips to deepen the kiss, but she realised that he was just moving closer to her.

When Mulder finally drifted away from her, slow as anything, the stimuli of the outside world muffled by the soft tunnel-vision Scully was experiencing, he smiled. It was a rare smile, one reserved for hospital beds and shared horrors, but Mulder smiled anyway. Scully found herself smiling, too, her common-sense lost to the collapsed wall and the taste of Mulder's lips.

"The world didn't end," Mulder said quietly, his breath warm on Scully's tingling lips.

"No, it didn't," she replied, feeling remarkably silly for not producing a better response.

She felt slightly as if she were in a bubble, hooked onto nitrous oxide, lost in Mulder's kind eyes. Those beautiful hazel eyes, that had held so much pain and so much hopelessness in the past, now glistened with an emotion that Scully could only identify as _love_.

His eyes held a silent promise of a future together, no matter what. Scully believed, for once in her life, that that promise was going to be kept.

"Happy New Year, Scully."

Scully tilted her head slightly, wondering if Mulder was going to kiss her again. She doubted it. He looked lost in the moment, too, and she knew that they were both afraid to end it, afraid to face a world where a kiss was just a kiss, where they were just Fox Mulder and Dana Scully: partners, not lovers.

Every moment had to end sometime, but that didn't have to mean that it couldn't happen again. Scully knew there was a future in Mulder. There was a troubled past and a troubling present, and the future held uncertainties that even Mulder couldn't suss out.

Even so, she knew they were good uncertainties, just this once. She believed in Mulder, and she believed in the future.

Just this once.

"Happy New Year, Mulder."


End file.
